Bad Signs

Roadside weeds wave wildly as I tuck in behind a truck for a cheeky tow up the hill. As I wait in his dirty wake, a crumby bumper sticker tells me that, ‘Without Trucks You Get Nothing’. Now I know who to blame for all the stuff in our lives. At the crest of the hill I check my mirror, swing out and push gently through his bow wave. For a brief moment, as I break free of the turbulence, I wonder where drag equals gravity and how much gas I’m saving by accelerating down a gradient. Christ, arterial routes are so dull, if I don’t find something else to think about I’ll soon be window shopping for my next car. I think about listening to music but most of the stuff I’ve got loaded into the changer is pretty charged and I need to stay focussed for this meeting. Over bright, deserted fields of monoculture a farm building wavers. What’s that? It has a banner on the side of it; “Beautiful Countryside, c/o British Farming”. This makes me wonder what it looked like before all the trees were cut down. The mood is plainly not good when you find idiocy in everything. Even the electronic traffic signs try my patience; ‘Plan your journey and arrive on time.’ What the fuck does that mean? It’s some kind of uber non-statement. I never plan my journey, I just drive around in circles until the muse takes me somewhere. What are they thinking of? In the space of fifteen minutes, cocooned in this steel box, three probably well-meaning but immovably partisan points of view have made an attempt on my sensibilities. There’s nothing in this for you or me but distraction. This kind of information is noise, litter on the landscape. I can do without it. Eventually I get to Portsmouth Naval Base where I collect my passes and make my way to the Mary Rose Museum, which recently failed its air leakage test. It’s not nice when one of your projects falls short but you can’t be part of it without accepting some degree of accountability, and today I must account for my part in it. When a building passes, everyone is your friend, things only get screwy around a failure and then you have to watch your step. On this occasion, failure has come from different directions and got us all surrounded. The designers and the builders messed up and I might have messed up too, by not being sufficiently robust in my comments. I was straight with them, but perhaps not hard or loud enough when it mattered. I feel sorry for them but it’s ultimately not my problem and today I’ve got to keep it not being my problem. That’s why I’m a bit twitchy, I can’t help but be affected by it, like everyone else, and I’m late into the bargain.